School of Sociology is proud to announce the Scott R. Eliason scholarship

The School of Sociology at the University of Arizona honors the memory of Professor Scott Eliason (1959-2015) through this scholarship award. The award covers the workshop and registration fees for participation in an Arizona Methods Workshop of the student’s choosing. All graduate students, regardless of discipline or institution, are welcome to apply.

Scott R. Eliason was Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Arizona from 2008 until his passing in 2015. Professor Eliason was known for his path-breaking work in quantitative methodology and statistics, focusing in particular on models for discrete outcomes and causality. He worked in a number of substantive areas including stratification, the sociology of work, economic sociology, the life course, the comparative welfare state and recently, the sociology of law. After completing a PhD at Pennsylvania State University under the tutelage of Clifford Clogg, Professor Eliason began his career at the University of Iowa in 1989, moved to the University of Minnesota in 2000, and to the University of Arizona in 2008. Early in his career, Professor Eliason developed a fruitful collaboration with Clogg on statistical models for categorical data and their applications to sociological questions. He quickly developed a reputation as one of the leading experts on categorical models, developing and maintaining one of the early computer programs for such analyses, teaching short courses at the ASA meetings, and publishing methodological papers on log-linear models, models for adjustment of rates, and models for labor force outcomes. Of particular note was his very popular Sage book on maximum likelihood, his endogenous switching model of labor markets, and his latent class approach to characterizing the life course as role configurations and pathways. At Arizona, he worked with Robin Stryker to combine fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis with causal inference, and with Erin Leahey and Sondra Barringer on the history of causal modeling. Throughout his career, Professor Eliason worked closely with graduate students, many of whom have established strong careers of their own. To honor these accomplishments, the School of Sociology has established the Scott R. Eliason Scholarship.\